CA AppLogic - Technical Details
Features
Virtual appliances
CA AppLogic replaces expensive and difficult to integrate IT infrastructure such as firewalls, load balancers, servers and SANs with pre-integrated and pre-tested virtual appliances. Each appliance runs in its own virtual environment that boots it's own Linux OS and appears as a separate physical server to the software that runs inside the appliance.
CA AppLogic's catalog appliances are built using leading open-source infrastructure like Fedora Linux, Apache, MySQL, JBoss and many others. Users can modify catalog appliances or build their own appliances from scratch.
Disposable infrastructure
Infrastructure is assembled visually and stored as part of the application in CA AppLogic. The infrastructure is essentially disposable; it's instantiated on the grid when the application is run, maintained while needed, and disposed of when the application exits.
Packaged distributed applications
CA AppLogic packages all code, data and infrastructure required to run a scalable web application into a single logical entity that can be started, stopped, managed, copied or even exported to another grid without modifications. By managing all interdependencies within the application, CA AppLogic leaves the user with a single logical entity that is easier to manage than most desktop applications. CA AppLogic includes several popular open-source applications such as Bugzilla, Twiki, SugarCRM and Zimbra. These applications are pre-integrated and ready to run.
Single point of management
CA AppLogic aggregates commodity servers into a scalable grid that is managed as a single system using a browser or secure shell. You can add or remove servers on the fly, as the gird is running, monitor the hardware, manage user credentials, reboot servers, install software, build virtual appliances, backup the system, repair damaged storage volumes, inspect logs and perform all other management tasks from a single point of control, all while the system is running. With CA AppLogic, managing a 48-server grid and a 2-server grid takes approximately the same effort.
Application scaling
CA AppLogic applications are fully virtualized and can be scaled easily from a fraction of a server to many servers. For example, the SugarCRM application included with the system scales from 30% of a CPU and 380MB of RAM to 7 CPUs and over 5GB of RAM without modifications. When starting an instance of an application, the user specifies the amount of system resources to be assigned to the particular instance within the limits set by the application integrator. Depending on the amount of resources specified, multiple instances of an application may run on a single server, while another instance of the same application may span multiple servers.
Operations monitoring
CA AppLogic includes a sophisticated monitoring system that provides unprecedented visibility into the operation of the web applications running on the grid. The system combines runtime information from the hardware, the virtual infrastructure and the applications themselves and makes this data available to the operator through an intuitive visual interface. You can monitor the use of system resources per application, virtual appliance or server, plus network traffic on each logical connection, as well as many software parameters from popular packages such as Apache, MySQL and others. You can also create and monitor custom counters that are computed from a 12 | P a g e combination of other counters, as well as set alarms on each counter.
High availability
CA AppLogic implements many features that improve availability of the system and the applications that run on it. These range from storage mirroring across multiple servers which ensures that a server failure never results in data loss, to the ability to recover from a failure of the grid controller, to high-availability features built into the catalog appliances. The ability to easily run two identical instances of the application on the same grid, or in different datacenters, provide the ultimate approach to high availability, in which a hot standby of your entire application is always available to take on the user load, should the primary instance of the application fail.
Resource metering
CA AppLogic has a built-in system for metering the resources used by each application. The system tracks and reports all significant events in the application lifecycle at which hardware resource use can increase or decrease, and the exact amount of memory, CPU and bandwidth assigned to the application on each of those events. The metering system is intended to serve as a foundation for sophisticated utility computing billing systems that make it easy to bill users for the exact amount of resources they consume.
Automation and integration
CA AppLogic comes with a powerful command-line interface that is fully scriptable and easy to integrate with datacenter management systems. In addition to scripts that control the operation of CA AppLogic, the interface makes it easy to intercept logical events such as server failure or reboot, start and stop of an application or appliance, failure of an appliance, intrusion detection and many others. Whenever such an event occurs, CA AppLogic runs a user-defined script that can take corrective actions and/or report the event to an external management system. For example, it is easy to write a script that restarts a failed appliance, or, alternatively, redirects the Internet traffic to a hot standby copy of the application and sends e-mail to the operator.
Run existing applications
Almost any existing multi-tier Linux application can run on CA AppLogic.
User Interface
CA AppLogic has a user friendly interface to quickly design your application infrastructure. Each application on CA AppLogic includes everything it needs to run on a grid of commodity servers. All the infrastructure components such as fire walls, load balancers, network configurations and database servers are combined with the application code and data forming a “single entity”.
Advanced monitoring and metering tools, as well as pre-packaged operational procedures are also combined with the application.
The binding of software to hardware enables applications running on CA AppLogic to be replicated on demand, on the same grid or in multiple locations without any code modifications.
To achieve true cloud computing, operators must have as much (or more) control of applications running in their virtual private datacenter as they have today in colo or in their own facilities. This requirement makes the user interface a critical component of the system. It must be both intuitive and powerful.
CA AppLogic's primary interface is an AJAX-based system delivered via a browser. The interface is visual and highly interactive, with the look and feel of a desktop application. Designing infrastructure within CA AppLogic has the feel of diagramming on a white board - but with the addition of a "run" button.
For power users, all system functions are also available through the command-line interface, making it easy to write automation scripts and integrate CA AppLogic with datacenter management systems.
The user interface of CA AppLogic consists of the following major components:
-
System dashboard
-
Infrastructure editor
-
Visual monitoring console
-
Command-line interface
System Dashboard
The dashboard is a web application that displays the configuration and current status of the server array, and allows the user to start, stop and manage applications. The dashboard is accessed by pointing a browser at the IP address of the controller.
Infrastructure Editor
The editor is a web application that allows you to visually assemble virtual infrastructure, create custom virtual appliances, manage catalogs of appliances and configure applications.
Visual Monitoring Console
The monitoring console is a web application that allows you to build a virtual network operation center by configuring, saving and displaying custom monitoring screens. The console combines run-time data for hardware, resource use and network traffic by application and appliance, as well as software-specific counters from inside virtual appliances such as the Linux /proc file system, Apache, MySQL and many others.
The monitoring console is accessed through links on the system dashboard.
Command-line Interface
The command line interface is accessed through a browser based shell session and provides operational control over applications. From the command line you can start and stop applications and appliances, repair volumes, and even migrate applications between datacenters.
Application Monitoring
Trying to monitor the operation of distributed applications has been an art in itself. To make operations as transparent as possible, CA AppLogic includes an integrated monitoring system that makes hundreds of counters available for building custom dashboards. You can use these dashboards to ease debugging, performance tuning, and monitoring of operations.
Each appliance in the CA AppLogic catalog includes dozens of counters that are available through the monitoring system. Available counters include generic counters like CPU usage, free memory, bytes transferred or volume space plus appliance specific counters for web servers and databases. Even network traffic counters are available.
To activate monitoring for your application, simply add the MON appliance from the CA AppLogic catalog to your application. Connect the MON appliance to each of the appliances in your application that you want to monitor. When you start your application you'll then be able to access the monitoring system and build custom dashboards. Just click to add a new graph, select counters, and then select the size and colors for your graph. Then arrange your graphs to present a coordinated view of your application's operation.
Once you've designed your monitoring dashboards, in addition to being available within CA AppLogic they can be accessed securely via the Internet from any browser anywhere in the world. You can literally monitor your operations from the corner cafe.